The Railway Navvies

by Terry Coleman

  The missionary, who was called ‘parson’ by the navvies, said that things were rough but not so bad, he hoped, as when he came fifteen months before, and that he had had ninety in his congregation at Batty Wyf Hole the previous Sunday. ‘It would do a fashionable curate a world of good,’ said the reporter, ‘to undertake this worthy man’s work for a few months in the winter season.’

  The reporter did not find Mr Ashwell, but he did come across Frank Moodie, the contractor’s assistant, a Northumbrian who was in charge of the line between Sevastopol and Dent Head, some of the heaviest work in the whole section. He was proud of his navvies: they were the best men, who did the heaviest excavating by piece work and earned great wages. Twenty-five men were clearing out a cutting which had been blocked by a landslip. The heave of their shovels was clockwork, no man stopped for breath, and the reporter thought them the perfection of animal vigour.

  Finer men I never saw, and never hope to see. Man for man, they would fling our guardsmen over their shoulders; they have all the height and breadth of the best picked men in a Prussian Grenadier regiment of the Guards Corps, without their clumsiness. For there is no heaviness in the muscular strength of these navvies. The stiff, greasy, blue black clay melts away bit by bit from before their indomitable, energetic onslaught, each man working as if he wrought for his life.

  They found another gang of twenty-five, working with a zeal that also spoke of piece work in every stroke. The best men on the working, said Moodie. No ganger was needed over them, and they would not stand one anyway.

  ‘The way the country has come to think now,’ he explained, ‘good men wonna stand to be ordered about. They wonna have a foreman cursing and bullying about among them.’ With piece work there was no need to supervise. All the contractor needed was a man to see that the levels were right, and an engineer to measure the work done every fortnight, to pay for it. The men were all English. As for the Irish, said Moodie, his navvies would take an Irishman by the back of his neck and throw him over the bank into the river.

  At the township of Jericho they saw the tommy truck, a peak-roofed affair like a shepherd’s cabin and full to the eaves with sides of beef. This was the men’s food; mutton they despised and bacon they ate only to fill up the cracks.

  A little way off, down in the shaft of the tunnel, twenty-five Cornish and Devonshire miners were working in blue stone rock as hard as millstone. They drilled and then blasted – not a spoonful came out unless they used gunpowder. Tub after tub was wound to the head of the shaft loaded with jagged fragments of the stone. In the tunnel itself, beside the shaft, 500 men were burrowing through Blea Moor. This was the only place where Irish worked alongside the others.

  The reporter rode back along the temporary way on one of the contractor’s locomotives, down reckless declines and up stiff gradients that would all have to be levelled before the permanent way was put down, past that fashionable part of Sevastopol where a suburb of detached huts was called Belgravia. Then, returning to Batty Wyf Hole, the reporter found a friend:

  I encounter a gigantic navvy in a huge moleskin monkey-jacket, with a round bundle on his back, and a great deal more inside him than was good for him. He was about to quit this happy valley. He had begun drinking on Saturday, and had sedulously pursued that walk of life ever since, having drunk all his wages, a Whitney pea-jacket with mother-o’-pearl buttons, six flannel shirts, two white linen ditto, sundry pairs of stockings, a pair of boots, and a silver watch with a gilt chain. Now he was going to try his luck elsewhere, with the meagre remnant of his kit contained in the little bundle on his shoulder. He insisted on treating me, and we tumbled over each other into one of the dogholes which do duty in Batty Wyf Hole for tap-rooms.

  About half-way through the second drink the tone of the navvy’s conversation suddenly changed. He wanted to fight the reporter, and threatened to kick his head off. But the landlady came and talked to the man gently, and he took this so much to heart that he began to cry, accused the reporter of being his brother, and then went to sleep with his head on his bundle.

  The works were heavy. Ashwell said they all worked like Yankees. Many died. In the church of St Leonard at Chapel-le-Dale, near Ribblehead, there is a memorial tablet:

  TO THE MEMORY

  OF THOSE

  WHO THROUGH ACCIDENTS

  LOST THEIR LIVES

  IN CONSTRUCTING THE

  RAILWAY WORKS

  BETWEEN SETTLE AND DENT HEAD

  THIS TABLET WAS ERECTED

  AT THE JOINT EXPENSE

  OF THEIR FELLOW WORKMEN

  AND THE

  MIDLAND RAILWAY COMPANY

  1869 TO 1876

  The navvies were as lawless as ever, poaching and rioting. ‘Threw a Stone Through the Window of The Naked Man Hostelry in Settle,’ said one headline. ‘Woman Charged with Assaulting another Woman in Hutted Camp,’ said another. The police were worried, and the Bench became severe. At Westmorland Sessions in April 1871, John Smith, aged twenty-eight, was given seven years’ penal servitude for stealing a half-sovereign, a half-crown, a florin, and a shilling at Kirkby Lonsdale. He had one previous, trivial, conviction.

  Queensland navvies blasting a cutting, c. 1910.

  In 1875 and 1876, as the works came to an end, the men gradually left, but by this time there were few other works they could go to. So throughout the seventies and eighties they had to go farther to look for work. Earl Brassey was once asked why old navvies were so rare. Was it because the work was so exhausting that they all died young? He agreed the work was hard and told on a man, but thought the main reason was that as soon as a man found he could not get constant work at home he went abroad. When an English railway was finished, he had known as many as 350 navvies to sail in one ship from Liverpool on their way to Australia. Some went out to places like the Sudan, built their railway and then returned, as the navvies of the 1840s had returned from their French and Italian contracts, but most were now emigrating for good.

  They spread all over the world. J. W. Miles, navvy, writing home from South Africa, said: ‘It would make you laugh to see the Black Kaffers come to work with hardly any clothes and no boots on.’ Another wrote from Australia to complain that ‘a great many colonials got beastly drunk’, and another, in Buenos Aires, said he was fine but you should see the gun-fights in the streets. Some went out only to do worse than they had at home – in the late spring of 1888 navvies from London were starving at Toronto – but most prospered. In India they were well paid and greatly privileged. In 1888 Lieutenant Gibbon of the Royal Engineers, an officer of the Military Works Department at Harnai which was building a railway to enable troops to concentrate rapidly on the frontier in case of a Russian invasion of India, said that he found the English navvies at 450 rupees a month cheaper than the natives at only twenty-five rupees: 450 rupees a month at that time was worth something like £400 a year, an enormous wage for a navvy. The Englishmen could not pronounce the names of the natives who worked under them and so christened them Tommy, Charlie, and so on, which much amused Mr Gibbon. Many of the natives, he said, were skilled workmen, but the English were paid so much more because of their character. The gangs of natives were from many different tribes – tall, handsome Afridis from near the Khyber Pass, thin, wiry Punjabis and short, thick tribesmen from near Karachi. Now, said Mr Gibbon, if it were not for the strong English rule, these men would be stalking about loaded with arms instead of ‘peaceably working side by side, with pickaxe and shovel, helping forward the great cause of civilization’.

  Not all went out to boss the Afridis or to disapprove of Argentinian gunfights. Many stayed at home to help forward the great cause of civilization here, by building docks, reservoirs, and gas-works, and in the nineties there were still enough of them to build the last few railways of any consequence.

  In 1892 there were still seventy-nine railway works in progress in Britain. Most were small, and the only one of any size was the West Highland line from Helensburgh to Fort William. I
n the seventy years since the beginning of the Stockton and Darlington Railway a network of lines had spread to nearly all towns of any size. The great companies – the Great Western, the London and South Western, the London and North Western, the Midland, and the others – were well established, and the railway system seemed complete. But the last main line was yet to be built.

  The old Sheffield, Ashton under Lyne, and Manchester Railway, which was created in 1837 and which built the Woodhead Tunnel, had grown since then and was still ambitious. In 1846 it became, by a series of mergers, the Sheffield, Manchester, and Lincolnshire Railway, controlling lines from Manchester to Grimsby and taking a good share of the prosperous mineral traffic of the Midlands. In the 1890s its chairman was Sir Edward Watkin, who was also chairman of the growing Metropolitan Railway which had reached Aylesbury, forty miles from London. It was his idea to build a new trunk line, linking the M.S. & L.R. and the Metropolitan, thus creating a new route from Manchester, through Sheffield, to Nottingham, Leicester, and London. The new line was vigorously opposed: nobody wanted it except Watkin and his colleagues. The older established main-line companies did not want another competitor, and so the Bill for the new London Extension, as it was called, was opposed and obstructed in every possible way in its passage through Parliament. The company asked powers to construct ninety-two miles of new line, beginning in the north at Annesley, nine miles north of Nottingham, the southernmost point of the old M.S. & L.R., then driving through Nottingham and Leicester, through Rugby, and to Quainton Road just north of Aylesbury, where it would join the Metropolitan. The trains would run over Metropolitan rails to Finchley Road, from where a stretch of line would be built to the new London terminus of Marylebone.

  Navvies on the Great Central, c. 1897.

  The last part of the line was planned to run under Lord’s cricket ground, and this brought great protests. The artists’ colony of St John’s Wood complained: that didn’t matter so much, because public and Parliamentary opinion took little notice of artists. But to offend against cricket was another thing. It was said that Sir Edward deserved to be seized by his own navvies and blown up. In the end the company was generous, because it had to be. It undertook to tunnel under Lord’s with great discretion, during the winter so as not to interfere with cricket, and to replace the same turf as if it had never been touched. Furthermore, as an extra consideration, the company bought a parcel of land from an orphanage which stood right next to Lord’s, and handed this over to the Marylebone Cricket Club, which thus acquired a much bigger ground than it had before, and did very well out of the deal. The M.C.C. withdrew its objection, the Bill, which had at first failed, eventually ground its way through both Houses at the second attempt and received the royal assent, and on 13 November 1894 Lord Wharncliffe, the first earl and third baron, cut the ceremonial first sod at Alpha Road, near Lord’s, just as, fifty-six years before, his ancestor the first baron had turned the first spade of earth at Saltersbrook on the old Sheffield line. The company was still called the M.S. & L.R.; the name was not changed to Great Central until 1897.

  Breakfast in old cellars at Nottingham.

  The work took four years, and nine thousand men worked on the line at one time or another, but there were also the steam navvies, mechanical excavators. The six contractors between them used thirty-nine of these machines, each of which could do the work of a hundred men. On this last main line the navvies lived more civilly than they used to, in huts made of wood rather than turf, and put up by the contractors, not left to the men to botch up themselves.

  To make a way through Nottingham and Leicester the engineers had to demolish whole slum districts. At Nottingham the tunnelling was made more hazardous by the deep cellars of ancient buildings, which had to be shored up while the work was going on. Some of these cellars were so old they were not marked on any map. Under the Guildhall, dungeons were discovered, and the bones of executed criminals. Beneath the Old Cross Keys inn the navvies’ tunnel broke into the wine and beer cellars, and they drank what they found. The tunnel also wandered into the cellars of the Dog and Partridge, but there the men found only a kind of herb beer.

  In the summer of 1895 Mrs Garnett, who was visiting the works, met an old navvy in a lodging house. He had come to Nottingham looking for work, his feet were skinned, and he was worn out. He was sixty-eight, and this had been his week’s tramp:

  Llanelly to Llandoyle

  29 miles

  Llandoyle to Rhayader

  32 miles

  Rhayader to Newport

  28 miles

  Newport to Shewsbury

  33 miles

  Shrewsbury to Uttoxeter

  30 miles

  Uttoxeter to Derby

  18 miles

  Derby to Nottingham

  16 miles

  Total

  186 miles

  Wasn’t that hard, she asked. And yet the man was going to try to get set on the morning after he arrived. This, said Mrs Garnett, was a real old navvy. She wished some of the young men would show some of the old spirit of independence and brotherly kindness. Only a fortnight before a ganger had told her:

  In the old days never was one of our chaps in trouble but pounds would be given on the works to help him, and now one has more bother to get a penny than formerly a shilling, and as to funerals I had to run about all day before I could get four men to follow a chap who died here.

  To which Mrs Garnett added her comment:

  You may call yourselves excavators and tradesmen and all kinds of fine names, but the real old navvy was far before you as a man.

  The navvy age was near its end and the old navvy was going fast. The missionaries, the contractors, and the men themselves, lamented the passing of the grand old tradition. The golden age was seen as the forties. When an old navvy died it became the custom to say, ‘He was an old Crimea navvy,’ or, ‘He was on the Great Western.’ The Balaclava Railway, Brunel’s line to Bristol, the Caledonian, the Paris and Rouen, became legendary. So did the London and Birmingham, and when in 1897 the latter-day navvies of the Great Central built a viaduct at Rugby, it was to take their last main line over the old L. & B., one of the first, engineered sixty years before by Robert Stephenson. And when William Falgate (alias Riley) died at Rugby in 1898, at the age of eighty, he had navvied on public works for sixty-two years. The whole of the navvy age is little longer than that. He could have worked for the Stephensons; he was there at the end and almost at the beginning. He saw it nearly all, and he was very likely a walking legend amply rewarded by drink.

  A navvy legend did grow up, around the known facts that the men shifted twenty tons of earth a day, were apt to be disorderly, and not uncommonly ate fourteen or even eighteen pounds of beef a week. But facts alone were not enough to create the legend, which was as noble as the lives of the saints and about as authentic. According to this legend, a navvy had pride, independence, courage, and freedom.

  Navvies’ dinner at Sulgrave on the Great Central.

  The pride was such that though, as Thackeray said, every Englishman’s hat came off of its own accord when he spoke to a lord, those of a good many navvies stuck on tight. It was such that a wounded man, who had been a proud and practising atheist, could on his death-bed refuse the importunities of those who offered him comfort and Christianity, provided he took them both together. He laughed at them and died with his hands over his ears to keep out their preaching.

  The independence was that of Jim on the West Wickham and Beckenham line who broke his foot, refused to go to the workhouse hospital, and stayed under the arch of a railway bridge near a stream. It was summer. Coffee and bread were sent to him twice a day by the ladies who lived near by, and other food and tobacco by his mates. He washed his shirt in the stream and had a fire in a brazier. He got well and went, leaving no trace. Then there was the man who would not beg: he came to the works on the tramp, in double canvas trousers, with a red handkerchief knotted round his head. After only two hours he fell down a
nd was carried to the workhouse where he died in two days. He was starved, but he would not ask for food. ‘The hungry look which rested upon his face after death,’ said the workhouse secretary, ‘was very distressing.’ At funerals, too, the navvies wanted things done their own way. Sometimes a few would go to the churchyard in advance, to inspect the grave and, if they did not like it, to improve it to their own ideas.

  Then there was the legend of cool, wilful courage. On the Rouen and Paris, so the tale went, a French miner in his blouse and an English navvy in his white smock jacket were buried alive together in a tunnel by the falling in of the earth behind them. In the commotion above, the English engineer, one Mr Meek, quietly measured the distance from the shaft to the sunken ground, satisfied himself that the part of the tunnel where the men had been might not have completely collapsed, and put all his men to driving a new shaft to release them. This shaft of fifty feet was sunk in eleven hours, and the men were brought out alive. The Frenchman, on reaching the top, rushed forward, embraced his friends, sat down on a log, took his head in his hands, and wept aloud and bitterly. The English navvy sat himself down on the same piece of timber, took his cap off his head, slowly wiped the sweat from his hair and face and then, looking intently for some seconds into the shaft from which he had just been pulled, as if calculating the number of cubic yards that had been excavated, said coolly and in broad Lancashire to the men who were staring at him, ‘You’ve been an infernal short time abaaout it.’

  The navvies also had their freedom. This was the age of lives spent in factories and sweat shops, but the navvy, with all his hardships, worked mostly in the open, and between contracts he was on the tramp. His life was a strange one, isolated and free, quite different from that of his fellow countrymen, and unknown to them. Navvies were seldom met in towns. You might find a few at a lodging house, but they did not mix. In prosperous times they were most often seen in third-class railway carriages, because they loved to see what they called the course of the country. When they left a place where they had worked for some time they frequently spent pounds in fares before settling down again. They were nomads. At one time there were 200,000 of them, yet to ordinary people they were practically unknown, and this increased the fear and the legend. In bad times, when there was no money for fares, they walked, and even when they had the money they sometimes preferred to tramp. In the early days they had to go on tramp to find work: later it became such a tradition that a man would tramp from Kent to Westmorland just for the extra fourpence a day he had heard was paid there. A navvy told a parson they were like the Israelites. ‘We goes about from place to place, we pitches our tents here and there, and then goes on.’